Art: Irishmen As They Are

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"This land," the late Jack B. Yeats once said, "is full to the brim of all things that lend themselves best to pictorial memories." The land was Ireland, and no man ever painted its dancing skies and robustly sentimental people with greater insight or exuberance. Today, the fame of Poet-Brother William Butler Yeats has partly eclipsed his own, but if Jack Yeats is less known than he deserves, it is largely his own doing. He refused to have his paintings reproduced during his lifetime, exhibited rarely and reluctantly. Last week, four years after his death at 85, 63 of Yeats' drawings and watercolors were on display at London's Waddington Galleries. Almost every one of them has been sold. Said Eric Newton in the Man chester Guardian: "His uniqueness lay in his extraordinary gift for turning an Irish brogue and a Celtic pilt into pigment."

The exhibition traces for the first time Yeats' development from his precise and detailed drawings of the 1890s to the fluid textures of his later romantic watercolors. Living apart from the world's art centers, Yeats was untouched by the overpowering movements of his time, developed a lyricism entirely his own. The world's most stirring sights, he once said, are a man plowing and a ship at sea. In the most prosaic of daily happenings, he found life's heroics; his eye was piercing, his heart all-enveloping. "The roots of true art," he said, "are in the affections."

"We Were Here." The son of Portrait ist John Butler Yeats, London-born Jack Yeats was more Irish at heart than either his father or brother. "We did not come with Elizabeth," he said, "or with Cromwell, or with Dutch William. We were here." He was a courtly, gentle man who daily fed the pigeons outside his Dublin house and often cut out puppets for children. "He always had a new joke to tell," says Irish Artist Norah McGuiness, "and never made a commonplace remark. He lived in a different world, and I wish I could have entered it."

When Playwright J. M. Synge toured Ireland's "western world" for the Man chester Guardian, Yeats went along. He filled sketchbook after sketchbook with scenes of Irishmen at race tracks, country fairs and circuses, and in boats, turf bogs and pubs. Foreign artists, especially those from England, rarely were able to paint the Irish without a touch of mockery, as if they were a nation of stock buffoons. Yeats painted them as they were, and the Irish loved him for it.

Tents & Stables. Always part child, he was fascinated by circuses ("If the world is to have another beginning, let it start next time in a circus tent—a one-poled circus tent") and by prizefights ("I still give and receive in the imagination the blows, bobbing up and down and wincing and setting my teeth"). Horses were another love. "I seem to have been constantly standing in stables admiring horses and listening to wise talk about them. When there are no horses or yachts to give good names to, we will have to give names to our nearest possessions, our false teeth perhaps."